techcrunch.com Archives - 17 April 2013, Wednesday

Nitrous.IO (formerly Action.IO) provides a lightning fast way to set up development environments and code in the cloud. No installation needed. Our platform makes setting up development environments as easy as starting a blog. In addition to lightning fast setup, we allow developers t...

Music streaming service Spotify has finally come to Asia. Today, it announced that it would be launching in the cities of Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia. Its premium service, priced at $9.99 per month in the US, will also be a little cheaper in the region, with Malaysians getting t...

At first blush Bitcoin is nothing special. Virtually anything can be used as a pseudo-currency. And, there is nothing new about a profound fear of fiat currencies and all manner of efforts to avoid the risk of relying on central bankers. Indeed, the prevalence of fiat (paper) currenci...

There’s a gold rush going on these days, or a Bitcoin rush, at least. Driven by the recent swings in the value of a Bitcoin , more and more people are learning about and becoming interested in the currency. While they could just buy Bitcoins at the current market rate, others are look...

CrunchWeek: Bitcoin Mania, Foursquare Gets A Cash Infusion, And VCs Rally Around Google Glass Colleen Taylor View Staff Page Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch and TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked as a reporter for GigaOM, the Financial...

A few months ago, while visiting a hacker friend’s magnificent new San Francisco loft, he gestured to a little alcove stuffed with server racks and said: “And over there are the Bitcoin mines.” I smiled and nodded, thinking, Oh, right, Bitcoin. Is that still a thing? Andy, if you’re r...

Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, ...

Bitcoin’s record highs and the ensuring surge in hacking attempts and thefts may be grabbing headlines . However, beneath the chaos, Silicon Valley’s best-known venture firms are finally starting to make real bets around the crypto-currency. The price of a single bitcoin had more than...

Another day, another Bitcoin-related investment, and further affirmation that VCs are hungry to invest in the ecosystem surrounding the decentralized digital currency. Today, OpenCoin , better known as the developer of open source payment protocol, Ripple , announced that it has raise...

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The price of freedom, as they say, is eternal vigilance. A user called bitbully on the Bitcointalk Forums found himself 34 bitcoins poorer when he visited a site claiming to be a chat service connected with Mt. Gox, a popular bitcoin trading service. The site, wwwdotmtg(this is an o)x...

Hi everyone, just a quick update on the situation and what happened last night. First of all we would like to reassure you but no we were not last night victim of a DDoS but instead victim of our own success! Indeed the rather astonishing amount of new account opened in the last few d...

Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150 . We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what ...

Today, Coinsetter , a New York City-based startup looking to launch a new Forex trading platform for Bitcoin, announced today that it has raised $500,000 in seed capital. The round was led by Tribeca Venture Partners, with participation from angel investors like SecondMarket co-founde...

Mining bitcoins – a process that helps manage bitcoin transactions as well as create new “wealth” – are the new Beanie Babies. Luckily for us, however, bitcoins seem to be going up in value and should maintain their value over time, unlike your mint condition Tiny the stuffed Chihuahu...

A commentator on Bloomberg, Princeton student Evan Soltas , writes that Bitcoin is an “existential threat to the modern liberal state,” a line that can be read in two ways. One reading of his op-ed suggests we are all in danger and that the inability to tax and track bitcoins will res...

All of these market-sizing analyses require a 2 to 2.5 order of magnitude increase over current levels. Those same metrics have shown a 1 to 1.5x order of magnitude increase in the last year, so it doesn’t stretch the imagination to think that it might be possible. But the question is...

Singapore beauty e-tailer, Luxola , just raised its Series A round from GREE Ventures. The amount was undisclosed, but has been rumored to be in the region of $2 million. The company carries about 60 brands of cosmetics and beauty products on its website, and ships to countries in Sou...

When Bitcoin made headlines last month for reaching the billion-dollar mark, it became a lot harder to scoff at the crypto-currency. What may have started off as an uber-geeky experiment, backed by anarchists and crazy digital libertarians alone, is garnering more and more legitimacy ...

Bitcoin’s wild surge in value has made it even more of an attractive target for hackers. Another wallet service called Instawallet said it is suspending itself indefinitely until it changes its security architecture. The crypto-currency, which currently trades at $129.90 to the dollar...

CrunchWeek: Amazon’s Purchase Of Goodreads, YC’s Smaller Demo Day And Bitcoin Hitting $1 Billion Leena Rao View Staff Page Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where ...

Singapore is a popular choice as a base for foreign companies looking to expand into Southeast Asia. Early last year, Sequoia Capital India MD, Shailendra Jit Singh, expressed interest in having the fund’s companies expand into the region . Sequoia Cap in the US also appeared to have ...

Hang around in the tech industry long enough and you or someone you know will be heard saying, “that’s so crazy it just might work.” Two years ago, if you’d told me that an open-source, P2P currency would soon be a thriving, billion-dollar market, I would’ve told you that you were on ...

PayPal phases out donations to non-profits and charities from Singapore accounts starting tomorrow, the 21st of March, and will complete this by the end of the month. This decision is a result of PayPal failing to get a remittance license in the country from the Monetary Authority of ...

Chope aims to connect diners with Singapore’s top restaurants, allowing online reservations via the company’s website Chope.com.sg, mobile apps, and plug-ins for restaurant websites and Facebook pages. Initially launched in Singapore in June of 2011 with just six restaurants, Chope ha...

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device - SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and u...

A Bitcoin brokerage, Bitinstant was hit by hackers who used a bit of social engineering to take control of the company’s DNS servers and ultimately funnel out $12,000 worth of Bitcoins. Hackers first took over the Bitinstant’s DNS domains and then the company’s email servers. They use...

Travelmob Continues Push Into Asian ‘Airbnb’ Market Victoria Ho View Staff Page Follow me on twitter Victoria Ho is a TechCrunch writer based in Singapore. She was previously the technology correspondent for The Business Times in Singapore, and senior writer for ZDNet Asia prior to th...

Russian phone maker Yota Devices will start making its first dual-screen e-ink YotaPhones in Singapore. The company has signed with Hi-P, a manufacturer in the country, to have it mass-produce the devices. Yota’s COO, Lau Geckler, told us that he is also in Singapore to help set up Yo...